"You just may need a box of tissues as you find yourself discarding all of your mouse and rat traps!"
 |
Ratrigues and the Invisible Intelligence by Graham Deeks Trafford Publishing
book review by John E. Roper
Most people look on rats, mice, and cockroaches as unwanted nuisances, vermin that should be exterminated instead of embraced as fellow living creatures. Deeks seeks to dispel this prejudice and raise these creatures to new heights in his humorous new book. Just as Watership Down was a novel that completely changed fantasy literature forever when author Richard Adams dared to tell an epic tale using rabbits as protagonists, and Brian Jacques made mice and stoats into warriors with the Redwall series, Deeks opens up the animal kingdom even further in this fairy tale for adults. Ratrigues is an unlikely hero.
A Ray-Ban-wearing, camera-toting Spanish rat from Portugal temporarily transplanted into South Africa, the alcoholic rodent is soon called upon to help save a colony of his cheese-nibbling cousins and other "pests" from annihilation. Together with a muscle-bound rat, two mice, and a couple of members of the Invisible Intelligence (an elite group of cockroaches), Ratrigues travels throughout the African nation on a quest for a new homeland. Along the way the group encounters a wide variety of intelligent creatures who manage to coexist in secret with mankind, a plethora of bars in train stations with spiders for doormen, and, at least for Ratrigues, true love.
A resident of New Zealand but a native of South Africa, Deeks has crafted a book that is both a travelogue of his homeland and a nature guide to the country's fauna. Filled with off-beat humor and likeable characters, his novel is a charming addition to the animal sub-genre of fantasy fiction.